Parker ‘tonkaaaap’ Talbot represents a new breed of poker superstar for 888poker.

Nine months ago 888poker added another player to their impressive group of ambassadors that might have left casual poker observers asking themselves, ‘Uhh, who the hell is Parker Talbot?’

888poker’s team of ambassadors already included the likes of online poker’s all-time tournament earnings leader Chris Moorman, Sweden’s Sofia Lovgren, German prodigy Dominik Nitsche and one of the hardest working people in the industry, Kara Scott. Adding Talbot might have seemed like an odd choice to some – but not to the 65,000 or so Twitch subscribers that follow every move the Canadian poker pro makes.

They don’t know him as Parker Talbot though. To them, he’s ‘tonkaaaaP‘.

Now 25, Talbot – rather ‘TonkaaaaP‘ – has been playing poker full time for a little over seven years, but he actually found the game a lot earlier than that. He still a middle-schooler when he first started playing.

“I was like 14 or 15 years old. Me, my mom and my dad all played (online),” said Talbot. The pair were playing 5p-10p Limit Hold’em before they came across some old World Poker Tour episodes that introduced them an entirely new world. “We discovered No Limit and we were like, ‘Holy shit, you can win a £20 pot on this? We are never playing Limit again!'”

This is where Talbot’s story shifts a little bit from the narrative of so many other players of his generation. Just around his 17th birthday his family noticed he was a little TOO into poker and began dialing it back and getting him refocused on school. He eventually made his way to university.

“When I went to university when I was 17, 18 years old, I didn’t play online at all,” said Talbot. “You would assume that most people as soon as they leave the house are like, ‘Fuck it, I’ll just play online now’. But I didn’t do that for some reason. I have no idea why.”

On his 18th birthday, Talbot took $100 and headed to a local casino to play $1/$2. He lost it all. Undeterred by that, Talbot took another $100, that his dad had given him for his birthday, and went back.

“Never really looked back after that,” said Talbot. “I used to show up on Friday night and leave on Sunday morning, playing 36-hour sessions of $1/$2 and built up a $5,000-$6,000 bankroll.”

After returning home for the summer, Talbot decided to take that bankroll and use it to play online cash games. He was four-tabling $0.25/$0.50 and unlike his live play, he was getting killed. One of his friends convinced him that maybe he should give tournaments a try.

“The second or third day, I got second place in the Daily $40,000 … for $10,000 or something,” said Talbot. From that point on, Talbot began working on his tournament game. He’s since amassed over $3.1 million in lifetime online tournament earnings and recently joined Upswing Poker as a coach.

Like everybody who has ever signed up to play at an online poker site, Talbot paused briefly when he came to picking his screenname. He eventually settled on ‘TonkaaaaP’ and his reasoning is a pretty strong reflection of his Canadian roots.

“I used to play hockey, of course. My coach started to call me ‘Tonka’, like a Tonka truck, because I was a smaller, stockier kid, but we always played contact hockey and I would always be able to rock the big guys,” said Talbot.

Over the next few years, Talbot focused mainly on turbo sit-n-gos while dabbling in MTTs. Along the way he found himself in an online chat group that included Jamie Staples. During one of their normal chats, Staples gave Talbot a push to start streaming on Twitch.

“I was just like, ‘Nah, that doesn’t sound very fun’,” said Talbot, who was in fact, having less fun playing on a daily basis after PokerStars decided to kill the Supernova Elite program. Talbot had been a SNE for three straight years and was on the verge of quitting poker after the program went away.

“I wasn’t really enjoying it anymore. Then I was just like, ‘Fuck it, I’ll just stream tomorrow; play a tournament session and just stream it’. I bought a microphone, I had a camera and I just clicked the stream button and did it,” said Talbot.

Now Talbot finds himself as one of the most popular poker streamers on Twitch. It’s caused Talbot to rethink what his role is exactly and in some cases, moving away from being JUST a poker player.

“I think there’s a balance. I definitely feel myself transitioning into more of an entertaining role, an ambassador streamer type of role for sure,” said Talbot.

With a growing following in the poker Twitch community, it made perfect sense that 888 reached out to him and started talking about ways to work together.

“A few months into the stream I got contacted by them, wanting to do some work with me. I wasn’t super interested in doing a small thing,” said Talbot. “Then we didn’t talk for a little and then had some more talks. We just ended up making it work.”

He officially joined 888poker as an ambassador in January 2017. Along with playing exclusively on 888poker on his Twitch channel, Talbot also began doing commentary work alongside David Tuchman at 888Live events.

“I think we’re a pretty good combo, to be honest. We have a decent amount of banter and we have a lot of fun carrying each other and making fun of each other while talking about cards,” said Talbot. “I feel like I’m a little bit more experienced poker-wise than Tuchman, and he’s way more used to the commentary role. We sort of bounce off of each other.”

Even with all of his success in poker, Talbot’s biggest fans are the same two people that introduced him to the game over ten years ago – his parents. His mom regularly tunes into the Twitch stream and actually serves as a mod on his channel.

“She’s in there, banning people. There’s an emote of her. She plays in pretty much all of our home games,” said Talbot, who says his parents always supported his decision to pursue poker. “We’re just like friends, you know? They’re obviously parental figures, but at this point, I’m an adult, they’re adults. We’re more like friends.”